Free Republic

Explore how the Newport Jazz Festival survived riots, rock, and revolution to birth some of jazz’s greatest live albums. In 1954 the smallest state in America started a tradition that changed the live jazz experience forever. Since then, the Newport Jazz Festival has been on board for every evolutionary phase of the music — bop, cool jazz, fusion, free jazz, whatever mode was making waves wound up on its stage. Luckily, the magic that masters like Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane, Gerry Mulligan, Ella Fitzgerald, and Cecil Taylor worked at Newport is captured on decades’ worth of live albums that...

This year, the Newport Jazz Festival is celebrating its 60th anniversary. For most of that time, its guiding force has been producer George Wein, who remembers all too well the first event in 1954. It was pouring rain. Wein was being urged to call it off but refused. The audience stayed, broke out their umbrellas, and the musicians played. The scene was caught by a photographer. "And that picture went out all over the world," Wein says, "of people sitting for five hours in the rain, listening to jazz." And who wouldn't have stayed? The lineup included Ella Fitzgerald, Count...

Barring the sudden ability to fold the country in half, the famed Newport Jazz Festival in Connecticut has always been out of reach for most West Coast jazz fans. Now, in a move that cries out for a return of a "Carmageddon"-like case of cabin fever, NPR Music will offer free streaming audio of all the happenings through its website or smart phone app beginning at 11 a.m. PST Saturday. (To whet your appetite, the station has already uploaded audio from last year's festival, including Ken Vandermark, Gretchen Parlato and Julian Lage.)